I'm looking for a good Rails source for this

I'd like a good source on how to set up controller actions and forms for creating a resource inside the view of another resource that it belongs_开发者_运维问答to...

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Set up your controllers as you would normally. You'll need to use the nested attributes feature of Rails. This enables you to create children objects at the same time as creating their parent using one form.

This is my go-to link for nested attributes. The only change you will need to make if you are running Ruby 1.9.2 is in the setup_person helper. returning has been deprecated so you can change it to:

def setup_person(person)
  person.tap do |p|
    p.children.build if p.children.empty?
  end
end

In typical Rails style, this will just work using standard controllers for each of your resources.

Other links

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/1/26/nested-model-forms

http://jeffperrin.com/2009/06/04/rails-nested-forms-and-collection_select/

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I don't have a web source that documents what I usually do, but I created a gist that documents what I do most often here: https://gist.github.com/900241

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The premise of the gist is that you have a project model with many project roles, and you want to edit many project roles in the project form. This is pretty much the classic accepts_nested_attributes_for scenario, and just about any page that talks about it will give you a decent writeup. The problem is, the solutions I've seen have always involved some seriously messy obtrusive JavaScript that escaped your entire form view and threw it in the onClick method of a link. I recently came up with a cleaner unobtrusive approach using jQuery templates.

You don't have to do a thing to your ProjectsController when you move to a nested model. Everything Just Works at the controller level, and you don't even need a ProjectRolesController. (This is why I didn't bother including them in the gist.) At the model level, it's just standard accepts_nested_attributes_for. Where it gets interesting is in the view.

The project form has two form_for blocks: one rendering a jQuery template, and another rendering the project roles form. The jQuery template in turn just renders the project roles form (mmm DRY!), but from within a <script> tag, and with a blank project role. Because the form is within a script tag, it won't get submitted along with the project form, and because the script type is "text/x-jquery-tmpl", this is completely valid markup.

When the user clicks on "Add a Project Role", it fires some jQuery that takes the form within the template, replaces the index with the current date (this is all so this project role can be uniquely identified), and appends it to the end of the project roles section of the form.

When the user clicks on "Delete" next to a project role, it checks to see if this project role is a new record, and if not, it appends a "_delete" hidden field to the end of the form. In either case, it removes the project role div from the DOM.